Early-stage investment firm Antler Australia recently backed a new cohort of startups as part of its ongoing program to build great local tech companies.

Startup Daily shares the details of each venture in the “Antler Investor Memos” series, which is designed to give you a quick, incisive insight into the startups and people involved, with many seeking follow-up capital beyond the initial pre-seed investment from Antler.

Company Name: Tango

Date of incorporation: 2022

Stage of business: Pre-seeding

founders: Sav Pushparajah and Aditya Deshpande

Current investors: antlers and angel investors

Currently increase: Yes

Description of the company

Former owners of professional services firms, Sav Pushparajah and Aditya Deshpande, are all too familiar with changing client workloads, in turn changing service level agreements, ultimately leading to delayed or worse, declined payments.

In 2032, almost all professional services will be provided online with the entire market is expected to grow to $10.12 trillion.

With agencies and clients rapidly experiencing digital transformation, accelerated by the pandemic, most back-end solutions for facilitating contracts, agreements and e-signatures are ill-suited to continuously evolving fields of work and are rarely updated even as new agreements are created .

SaaS platform, Tango, combines proposals, contracts and payments in Live Agreements with one simple user interface. As projects evolve and change, these agreements are easy to update and sign, while disputes are resolved faster as all communication takes place within Tango.

Tango’s platform leverages advancements in technology including open APIs and generative AI to empower agencies and clients to stay in sync, streamline projects, and stop unpaid scope creep.

Antler investment thesis

“Sav and Aditya have combined their experience as agency founders and their deep appreciation for related challenges in cash flow management and administration with complementary skills in digital transformation and enterprise sales to create a purpose-built solution,” said Cath. Rogers, partner at Antler Australia.

“With promising early traction, Tango’s Live Agreements platform is creating a new category within this rapidly evolving space.”

Traction/milestones, so far

Since obtaining Antler’s Pre-Seed funding in November, Tango has received $150,000 in grant funding from the NSW Government’s MVP Ventures Program and has added more than 1,150 service providers to the waiting list.

As Tango prepares for the MVP launch, it has signed a prominent HubSpot agency to help refine its product, along with a closed group of nine other agencies for launch later this quarter.

Latest financing

Pre-seeding antlers

Use of Funds

With the initial investment from Antler Australia, in addition to grants and angel investments, Tango is accelerating its product development to launch its MVP and rapidly scale distribution. All the while, it continues to build out its roadmap, including embedding generative AI at various stages of the agreement process.

The founders say

“As freelancers and then agency owners, we let money flow out when the scope of work changed, but agreements wouldn’t — and then clients would refuse to pay. We had no solution to cope with the changing nature of service projects other than the costly exercise of expanding the workforce to hire an account manager,” said Sav Pushparajah, co-founder of Tango.

“In solving this pain point, our mission is to make Tango Agreements the default agreement platform for professional services firms and their clients, starting with software channel partner ecosystems such as Hubspot and Webflow. By helping to stop unpaid scope creep, we can have a significant impact on the top and bottom line.

“We are a global company operating from day one helping to create agreements between agencies and their clients around the world. Our first client is a leading agency with 70% of its clients outside the country in which it operates. As a global VC, Antler has been able to connect us with experts around the world, whether it’s legal, payments or operations, to help us move quickly.”

What’s next?

Antler, an early-stage global VC, is revealing all of its latest investments in aspiring Australian founders and startups. With 100 investments in start-up companies, Tango is one of the most recent portfolio companies.